Ajax Girl

Sling Media, the creators of a hardware device that lets users stream their home television signal to an Internet connected device anywhere (with a software download), is preparing to launch their new video portal, Sling.com. The company first mentioned the new portal earlier this year but has been quiet since then.

Today though, several readers received emails from Sling Media with information about beta testing the service:

Dear Sling Beta Team,

Sling Media is getting ready to roll out a private beta program for our new website, Sling.com. And you’re invited!

We really need your help banging on the site and providing feedback so we can improve some rough spots before we push a release to a broader audience.

Getting Started

- First, go to https://betasecure.sling.com/account/login and click “REQUEST AN INVITE” on the right.
- Over the course of the next couple of days and weeks we’ll be sending out batches of invites to our beta team.
- When you get your invite, follow the link provided and you’ll be prompted to either create an account or update your existing Sling Account. Then you’ll be off and running.
- Please keep in mind, this is a US only test. Other users will be geo blocked unfortunately.

Sling.com Features

Sling.com is a new online video portal that will give users access to a premier library of content from top TV networks, movie studios, sports leagues and websites. Combining professional programming, editorial expertise and social networking features alongside easy and logical navigation.

In addition to premium on-demand video content from 60 partners (and counting), Sling.com includes a preview of the web-based Slingplayer software for PC, allowing Slingbox owners to watch live TV directly within our website.

Your Feedback

We need your feedback so we’ve made it very simple. You’ll notice a “feedback” button on the right-hand side of every page in the site. Click it and use the tool to submit your feedback from any page quickly and directly.

Submit bugs, suggestions, usability issues, content problems, performance issues, etc. using the feedback tool and we’ll take it from there.

Your feedback is critical and we look forward to hearing from you as we launch the first of many phases of Sling.com. Please treat your Sling.com account with the utmost confidentiality and do not share any information about Sling.com with anyone outside the beta program.

Regards,

The Sling.com Team

The new service will let users grab snippets of television content, upload them to the Sling site (Hulu also lets users create quick content snippets), and create playlits and feeds that can be viewed and subscribed to others.

According to the email above, Sling will also provide direct access to content from sixty current partners, and let SlingBox users access their TV directly from the browser.

Sling v. YouTube, Hulu and Joost

Suddenly Sling Media doesn’t look much like a hardware company, but rather a direct competitor to online video sites like YouTube, Hulu and Joost. If users can control their own television and DVR through the browser, and also access direct premium content, it’s a big competitive advantage over those other services. It may even get me to buy a SlingBox.

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Last week, I announced (in conjunction with Dash and Trulia) that we would give away a Dash GPS car navigation device to whoever could come up with the best new app for it. Readers came up with more than 300 suggestions, including the sketch at left (which I have no idea what it is supposed to be). But many of the ideas were pretty solid.

They included things like calendar integration, ride-sharing apps, an OpenTable mashup, and some interesting location-based games.

But the Dash GPS goes to Alfred Toh, who came up with ParkSpot:

ParkSpot - A real time social parking utility.

Basically, dash owners will help other dash owners find parking on busy city streets. When one dash owner is getting ready to leave, set your ParkSpot status to ready to leave and this will broadcast your location to nearby dash owners whose set to finding spots.

Another great idea, which a few people hit upon, revolved around location notes or geographic bookmarks, but the person who nailed it best was Rob Graff, who came up with Muck:

Muck - ‘A location based twitter like app’
You write a 200 character or so message, which is then geo tagged and sent to a database. When other people drive pass location where you wrote the message, they are read you message through their dash. Stuff like “this is the longest red light in town” or “there is a funny looking bum on this corner every morning” come to mind.

Rob will get a TechCrunch T-shirt. The second runner-up, who also gets a T-shirt is JW, who came up with:

*Ad-Supported Tolls*
The GPS knows when you are going thru tolls and could show however many geo-targeted ads would offset the cost of that toll. This could be linked to an E-Z Pass account so Toll-Booths wouldn’t hafta make any changes.

Honorable mentions (sorry, no prizes):

Seth McGuinness:

Garage Sale search and proximity locator.

Tim Baker:

My app would be a shopping utility. You input the item you’re looking to buy and it shows you retailers on the map that sell that item and the price. You can find the shortest distance to get the product for the lowest price.

Chester Ng:

Blabba.

An app that blabs to you; er, reads (e-mail, RSS feeds, etc.) to you so you crazy drivers (me included) can stop thumbing around on your iPhones and Blackberrys while you drive.

John Whitney:

Guided Tours!

Your in a new city, or maybe your hometown. You download a tour, maybe for a specific topic like architectural history. You follow the tour in your car and it tells you some interesting things about where you are. It tells you stop & park and then you can read some more, maybe get out and look for something interesting. The cool thing about this is that the tours could be on many subjects. I’d love to take a guided tour of my town, Schenectady - there’s lots of hidden history all around.

JSL:

Valet Monitor - it keeps track of how far they took your car! (think of Ferris Bueller) You enter a PIN and the device won’t shut off till you disable it. I think the Ferris Bueller car scene would be a great marketing ad for Dash in general.

IdeaTagger:

P2P Parcel Delivery: A peer-to-peer parcel delivery service that brings people who want to send parcels with people in their area who are going to the parcel’s destination area. Dash can be used for tracking purposes.

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Yeah I know, it isn’t even September any more, and we’ve already said Happy Birthday to Google twice. But this video comment left on the first post is just too good not to post. I have no idea who this is, but she’s a star.

If her parents would like to let us know who the talent is, we would love to send the whole family TechCrunch tshirts.

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Most of us will never go to space - at least, not for a decade or so. But while we may not be able to go on a space walk or bounce around in zero-G, the prospect of being able to send something into the Great Beyond sounds like a decent consolation.

IntoSpace.org is hoping to make that happen for a mere $2.

The site is offering a deal that is reminiscent of the Million Dollar Homepage. You pay $2 for the rights to a 0.4×0.4 inch block on a piece of paper, on which you can include a photograph, piece of text, or logo. If you purchase more than 20 blocks at once, you’re eligible for a small discount. There are around 250,000 blocks available, which means IntoSpace could potentially earn around $500,000.

It sounds like a neat idea, especially for the ridiculously low price. Unfortunately, it seems that the site hasn’t really figured out the logistics of actually getting to space. There’s a tentative launch year of 2010, but it seems the site has yet to work out any further details:

The right to choose the company (space agency) which carries out space programs and the way of catalog delivery into space is due to the organizers of the project. Sending of the catalog into space is due to be realized within 2-year time frame after the last seat in the catalog is booked (excluding VIP and free invitation seats).

And, of course, the site reserves the right to change its terms at any time without any notification.

It could easily be a scam - it would be nearly impossible to ever verify that IntoSpace ever made good on its promise. But I can’t help but picture the site’s founder, Arthur Stubbs, triumphantly carrying his massive binder of photos as he boards one of the first consumer flights to leave for space.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts. The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment.

Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days.

At this point it’s too early to tell if Google Blogsearch will be more useful than any of the other memetrackers (or if its even in the same league). Much of its utility will lie in how often the listings are updated, how many sources it pays attention to, and how it assesses a blog’s credibility - a memetracker is only as good as the stories it presents.

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Image licensing platform GumGum has scored a deal to serve free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network. Glam publishers will have access to photos from Splash News’ catalog of celebrity images, many of which run from $75-500 apiece under standard licensing deals. In lieu of these fees, GumGum will allow publishers to display their images with ad overlays free of charge (publishers will receive around 20% of the revenue from these ads - the rest will go to GumGum, Glam, and Splash).

The deal comes two months after GumGum annouced a major shift in the technology used to power its platform. In the past, the site would issue photographs as Flash objects, which made them easy to track and monetize with ads. But Flash-based images are slow and clunky compared to a normal image file, which made the system unappealing to publishers.

In July GumGum dropped the Flash technology in favor of a system that uses standard image formats. Now, publishers are free to crop and modify their images (which they couldn’t do with the Flash version). GumGum uses a combination of photo metadata and image recognition to identify the licensed photos, and overlays ads accordingly. If a publisher doesn’t want ads to appear on their images, they can pay a modest fee tied to the number of times an image is viewed, rather than the one-time bulk fee typically associated with image licensing.

While GumGum acknowledges that it’s probably possible to fool the image recognition system, it has shifted its business to appeal to legitimate publishers - anyone who wants to pirate an image probably wouldn’t sign up for the service in the first place.

Glam Media is an advertising/publishing network that focuses almost exclusively on content for women. With over 600 member blogs and sites across Glam’s network, GumGum stands to see its userbase grow dramatically - the company speculates that the number of images it serves could potentially double with the deal.

GumGum competitor PicApp forged a similar deal with blog network b5media earlier this year. And Glam’s biggest rival Sugar Inc allows its bloggers to use images from Getty images.

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The economy might be about to tank, but why should the children have to suffer? If you are going to give to charity this year (and you should, every one of you), we highly recommend giving to DonorsChoose. Each donation funds a classroom project or equipment for teachers who too often have to fund supplies out of their own meager paychecks. This year we are once again participating in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge, which raised a total of $420,000 in 2007.

You can give as much as you want (the minimum donation is $10). Last year, I bought a digital camera for a classroom in Illinois, and got hand-written thank-you notes from each student. It really brought home how a few hundred dollars can make a big difference to a roomful of students. But to encourage some serious donations, we decided to make it a little more interesting this year. The top three donors who give at least $1,000 each will receive an All Events pass from TechCrunch. This pass will be good for two tickets to any MeetUp or conference that TechCrunch helps to put on between November 1, 2008 and November 1, 2009. All of them, including TechCrunch50 and the Crunchies. (A single ticket for TechCrunch50 alone cost $2,995 this year).

Not only that, but as an extra bonus, whoever donates the most will also get a one-hour pitch session with angel investor Ron Conway, who has generously agreed to donate his time for this worthy cause. All proceeds go to DonorsChoose, a tax-deductible charity. We’ll even throw in five TechCrunch t-shirts as runner-up prizes (they are very rare, you know).

We’ve picked some classroom projects worth looking at, or you can find your own. As long as you donate via this TechCrunch page or through the widget below, it will count towards our total and put you in te running for the tickets and the Ron Conway session. Also, if you are an American Express cardholder, vote here to give DonorsChoose a chance at an extra $1.5 million donation.

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Here at TechCrunch we’re big believers in mobile social networks. In February I wrote about how the iPhone is the perfect ecosystem to have it’s own social network (awesome device and software, location aware, elitist users). And in April I showed a teaser of an upcoming social network from Loopt that did everything I had asked for: iPhone only to start, location aware so that you could meet new people around you.

Loopt has now launched all of those features, and they’ve built a special version of the service just for TechCrunch. Once you’ve added the application to your iPhone you can see where your friends are and what they are up to. And you can also meet TechCrunch Loopt members who are near you even if they aren’t your friend yet.

Sign up here, or do a search for LooptTC on iTunes (links to iTunes apps currently don’t work).

The meet feature is called Mix and is shown in the video below. Once you turn it on it will show you other users who are around you, and some basic information about them. You can message those users (and you can also block anyone who’s being annoying).

This will really come in handy at TechCrunch meetups and events. The network will show you which of your friends are nearby if you are having trouble finding them. And as you meet new people you can see a little bit about them on your phone (picture, name, where they work, etc.). If you connect, you can add them as a friend.

The application will show you other users who are nearby (up to 15 miles away). And we’ve added one special feature as well - all users will see my profile and location wherever I am in the world, even if its on the other side of the world. Right now, for example, I’m in Anacortes, WA hanging out at my parents home.

If you are already a Loopt member, you can still join the TechCrunch network in the Mix settings.

To date the big social networks have ignored location awareness on mobile devices, probably over privacy concerns, which I believe is their Achilles Heel. Look for that to change as this new crop of mobile social networks gets traction.

Disclosure: Just to be 100% clear, this should be considered a sponsorship and will be noted in future Loopt coverage.

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There is a rampantly liberal underlying message to this video (”if you care about sick people getting health care, you have to vote”), but the message is a good one. If you want to complain about the government the least you can do is take the time to vote for whoever you dislike the least. So whether you’re a whiny liberal, a warmongering conservative or, like me, a pragmatic, peaceful and compassionate libertarian, go for it. Google has set up a great website to register here.

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Source: TechCrunch
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{via Coudal}

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1269-stroll-the-white-city